Donna V. Jones

Professor Jones serves as Core Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. She is on the Advisory Board for the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, and is also affiliated with Gender and Women's Studies.

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity
Winner of the Jeanne and Aldo Scaglione Prize in Comparative Literary Studies in 2010. The Prize citation reads:
"Donna V. Jones’s Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity is a groundbreaking study of négritude and its major theorists, the poets Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, that examines their adaptation and transformation of the philosophies of vitalism pro....

"Mysticism and War: Reflections on Bergson and His Reception During World War One", requested for special issue "Bergson, l'Europe et la Première guerre mondiale", Annales bergsoniennes, tome VII, Presses Universitaires de France (22 octobre 2014). Revised version appearing in the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, ed. Mark Westmoreland (2016)

Review of Stephen Cave, Immortality: The Quest To Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions (manuscript accepted pending revision)

"On A Feminist Aesthetics of Possibility in Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf", requested for a book symposium on Ewa Ziarek's Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 25, No.2, 2014

"The New Vitalism: Towards a Cultural and Philosophical Study of Biotechnology", Journal on African Philosophy, No. 11 (2015)

Respondent to the panel "Corps, représentations, circulations dans la France contemporaine" at the conference "Blacks of France: New Dimensions in History and Historiography of an African Diaspora", UC Berkeley, March 21, 2014

"The Ambiguous Promise of European Decline: Crisis, Aesthetic Possibilities and the Re-Alignment of Power in the Wake of the Great War" for the Symposium on "Plotting Internationalism", Duke University, November 15, 2013

"Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism", Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, University of Oregon, October 24th, 2013

"A New Story Had to be Written: A Roundtable Discussion of the Life and Work of Chinua Achebe", Museum of the African Diaspora, October 6th, 2013

Plenary Address, "Theories of Life in the 20th and 21st Centuries", Department of English, Rutgers University, February, 26, 2011 http://theoriesoflifeconference.wordpress.com/

"The Message of Blood: Thoughts to Mull Over", Program in African-American Studies, UC Irvine, February 16, 2011

"What is Left to Live For? Biopolitics and the Dystopian Vision of Children of Men", Conference "What is Left of Life", University of California, Berkeley, February, 2007

Invited Roundtable Participant. "Senghor, The Ancestor: Celebrating the Life and Work of Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001)", Harvard University, October , 2006

"The Rise of the Colored Masses": The Place and Function of the Non-Western World in Pessimistic Narratives of History", Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, October, 2006

"Mimesis, Monumentality and the Modern at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition", Rights and Technology Lecture Series, Brown University, February 2006

"Race and the Temporality of Modernism", MELUS Conference. Padua, Italy, July 2002

Professor Jones is currently working on two projects, The Ambiguous Promise of European Decline: Race and Historical Pessimism in the Era of the Great War (62,000 words) and The Tribunal of Life: Reflections on Vitalism, Race and Biopolitics (20,000 words).